The human rights organization Amnesty International warned on Tuesday that the tracking applications developed by Bahrain, Kuwait and Norway to contain the spread of the new coronavirus were "among the most dangerous for privacy". Many countries have turned to mobile technologies to track the movement of people and those they come into contact with, allowing authorities to trace the Covid-19 contamination chains.
A detailed technical analysis of 11 applications has demonstrated, according to the NGO, that those implemented by these three countries make it possible to "follow live or almost directly the movements of users", the GPS coordinates being frequently downloaded by a database. Real-time government reports, "which is probably neither necessary nor proportionate," said Claudio Guarnieri, head of Amnesty International's Security Lab, in a statement.
Less invasive Bluetooth
Less invasive applications use Bluetooth connections to detect the interactions of users infected with the disease. Norwegian authorities said on Monday that they will suspend their Smittestopp application after the national data protection agency Datatilsynet has decided to ban the Norwegian Institute of Public Health from '' use the information obtained via this tool.
"We also call on the Bahraini and Kuwaiti governments to immediately stop using these applications in their current form," wrote Claudio Guarnieri. Officials from the two countries said on Tuesday that the applications were "only" intended to combat the spread of Covid-19 disease. "This is an opt-in ... and all users are informed before downloading the application that it uses GPS software," said a spokesman for the Bahraini government, adding that it had been downloaded 402,000 times.
A Kuwaiti official also said that the application used in his country was "only linked to the new coronavirus" and that it was introduced "to follow the movements of users violating a mandatory quarantine of 28 days".
The Arab Gulf States, bordering Iran, the most affected country in the Middle East, have implemented very strict containment or even movement control measures to halt the spread of the new coronavirus on their respective territories. At the end of May, a security breach in the Qatari application for tracking infected people was revealed and denounced by Amnesty International because it exposed the personal data of more than a million users to cyber attacks. The defect in the code of this application, the use of which is compulsory, has been corrected following the report by the NGO.
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